Poetry Winter 2016 fiction all issues
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Cover Joel Filipe
Alexander McCoy
Questions to Ask a Mountain
& other poems
Alexandra Kamerling
Prairie
& other poems
Debbie Hall
She Walks Into Starbucks Carrying a 2 x 4
& other poems
Michael Fleming
Patience
& other poems
Jim Pascual Agustin
Sheet and Exposed Feet
& other poems
Melissa Cantrell
Collision
& other poems
Martin Conte
Skin
& other poems
AJ Powell
The Road to Homer
& other poems
Paul W. Child
World Diverted
& other poems
Michael Eaton
Remembrances
& other poems
Lawrence Hayes
Walking the Earth
& other poems
Daniel Sinderson
Like a Bit of Harp and a Far Off Twinkle
& other poems
Sam Hersh
Las Trampas
& other poems
Margo Jodyne Dills
Babies and Young Lovers
& other poems
Nicole Anania
To the Dying Man's Daughter
& other poems
Lisa Zou
Under the Parlor
& other poems
Hazel Kight Witham
Hoofbeat Heartbeat
& other poems
Margaret Dawson
Daylily
& other poems
James Wolf
An Act of Kindness
& other poems
Jane A. Horvat
Psychedelic
& other poems
Bill Newby
Touring
& other poems
Jennifer Sclafani
Hindsight Twenty Twenty
& other poems
AJ Powell
The Road to Homer
As the brief night lifts its gray blanket
My eyes drink long draughts of wilderness
The road is hedged by granite crumble and rock slab
The flora is white lace and purple garnish
Peninsular waters of cold turquoise flash sunlight
Off the wings of a blanched low-soaring seabird
Waterfall strands plummet past the height of skyscrapers
Down mountain mammoths my sight can’t keep in frame
Clouds in highest climes perch on peaks
Like egrets on the shoulders of elephants
The spires of this cathedral are green tangle-trees
Snagging my soul on their branches
My throat is thick with gasping
I am diminutive and wide-eyed
My senses are swallowed
By the ample world
If civilization drowns in the ices we melt
I will come here, become a bear,
And feast on salmon and honey
Caterpillar Girl
Daughter, did I step on you?
Caterpillar of my heart
With your spiney sensitivity
Feeling for the world’s
Hard corners and soft edges
Inching along
Bristly-soft and vulnerable
You taste and test
And button-hunt and press
And press and press
To know your power
Build your defenses
Arm yourself and
With charm and glances
Disarm us
My foot falls heavy and large sometimes
My beak-like words
Peck and threaten to consume
Your still-soft self
I am sorry
I will do better to protect for you
This world-sized, lifelong
Chrysallis
Your wings are readying
Present and developing
At times dampened by sorrow
And the everyday betrayals we adults visit upon
You and all child-hearts
Inch along still, growing girl
Travel and transform
Then
Spread
Lift
Ascend
But perch again
Near
I’ll tame my steps yet
Sandpaper on Silk
Life is sandpaper on silk
Snags are inevitable
When the beautiful and the rough
Rub against each other like lovers
It isn’t the sandpaper’s fault
Ontologically speaking
It has its place, can make
A hewn log as smooth as . . .
Silk too has its attributes
A fragile beauty which
Falls like water, whisper soft on skin
(Though I’m not sure the worm’s perspective on it)
Life is the terrible disappearing space between them
The unraveling of fine things
Brought too close for their own good
Balmy summer temperatures meet ice caps
And all our polar bears are left drowning
Lives march to matter more than gunshots
Neighborhoods divide along fault lines
Of difference and indifference
Mid-life crises leave children
Half-orphaned every other week and holidays
How can we contain our contradictions?
How do we reconcile
Peace and power
Romance and reality
The Just Cause and the just flawed
Without tearing up hearts or
Lopping off heads in private jihads
Bloody and holy and now?
Life is sandpaper on silk
Or a junkie’s temporary ecstasy
Or a flaming marshmallow—sugar turned to ash
Sun Salutation
We rest at night under star shine or cloud cover
Forgetting
The sun is always mountaineering
Our sun makes a repetition of ascents we suckle on
Like a baby at the breast, hovering hummingbird at blossom
We sip and sup the sun assuming
She will never tire, always return
The golden orb sits herself upon the horizon
Gathers her breath
And begins her climb to the peak of the sky
Only to descend from her zenith
To a rest she never reaches
Finding yet another day to scale
And so she clambers on
Delivering again to us
The gossamer goodness
Of her warmth and illumination
When the world turns cactus on us
When our atmosphere burns toxic with vitriol
When life is a live wire that snaps toward our hearts
When our minds lay the lash down on our own backs
Then let us look up
The sky is firmament
And we are living upside-down
So in the morning
I will sit under the caress
Of the sun’s side-slanting first rays
And consider my small self
I will watch the sun Rise
Gather my thankful breath
And proceed, breathing
Leaping with Esther
“Who knows whether,” or so the story goes, “you have been lifted up
For such a time as this?”
A question, not a statement:
Who knows whether?
For there is God’s grace spread abroad in the world
And then there is consistent stupidity and even
Dumb Luck
I for one can’t tell the difference
Most days are through a glass darkly
And no clarion Christ calls to me
From the noise of my circumstances
God visits me like light skipping on water
My life briefly blessed by
A ripple that makes me blink
And but for my watering eyes
I might not know it was there
Such is the God I know and love
Better by the contours of my longing
Than my faith
So, “Who knows whether?”
A grand Maybe, a glorious Perhaps
Holding familiar uncertainties:
Dark Humor and Bright Pain and “Who knows whether?”
A plan exists, things come together for good
Or
We are simply spinning unhinged in a fathomless sky
All we know is Esther
Writhed in great anguish, risked her very life
For permission to throw a cocktail party
She must’ve read the Psalmist who penned the 23rd:
Yay though I walk
“Fast for me.”
Through the Valley of Death
“If I perish I perish”
Thus she dressed in her best,
Prepared to gamble on her best guesses
And charmed a way for her people
Out of holocaust
The Jews weren’t annihilated in Persia after all
She thwarted schemes; they didn’t perish
But their defense went on the offensive
And the almost-annihilated became annihilators
Esther spoke up again and
(Please God, in time to stop the wheel
Of blood feud revenge cycles from turning)
Decreed instead another party
To turn mourning into dancing
Replacing war with a holiday
(Teaching us not to fight for salvation
But to dance for it)
Esther I think had a wicked sense of humor
A gallows humor
And God seems to have a gallows humor too
Giving us the gift of just one certainty—
A certain death—
Then spinning a Resurrection tale
We are invited to believe
In a scarlet thread and a golden dawn
Thorny crown and crystal throne
Bloodied crossbeam and rolled away stone
God is Absurd
Which is perhaps why I—the only way I could—
Believe
Only in a dancing Jester God, a Jokester with the Perfect Prank:
To love us, each and every fucking one
Alleluia
AJ Powell
is a once and future teacher who raises her children, serves on a school board, and attempts to write in the wee hours of the morning with varied success.